Have you ever noticed how the words “heroine” and “heroin” are suspiciously similar? In the new drug-fueled indie film Candy, the love triangle between the hero, his love for the heroine and his addiction to heroin makes for a harrowing and depressing piece of cinema similar to Requiem for a Dream – just not as good.
If you don’t see Candy, you can infer what happens from one of the film’s best quotes: “When you can quit, you don’t want to, and when you want to, you can’t,” a junkie says. But you should see the movie anyway.
Adapted from a novel by Luke Davies, the film is about the love between a poet, Dan (Heath Ledger, Brokeback Mountain), an art student, Candy (Abbie Cornish, Everything Goes), and the passion the two share for heroin, Kurt Cobain’s and Keith Richards’ drug of choice. As the two go from being casual users to married junkies who have found “the secret glue that held all things together,” their dysfunctional relationship becomes one of functional hatred as they rapidly fall apart.
Candy is divided into three parts, with subtitles separating the “heaven,” “earth” and “hell” chapters of the film. “Heaven” immediately introduces the audience to a scene of heroin use, as Candy moves from snorting heroin to injecting it as Dan does – and then overdoses in the bathtub. Any normal person would stop there, but not Candy; instead she says, “That was beautiful. Let’s have some more.”
It’s that type of overindulgence that fuels the relationship between Dan and Candy. They beg, steal and con their way into getting money for their addiction, and if none of those methods work, the two simply visit Casper (Geoffrey Rush, the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy). A biology professor Dan calls the “dad you always wanted,” Casper has an uncanny talent for altering morphine into pure, “yellow jesus” heroin and passing on his end results to the young couple. It’s Casper who is there when Candy and Dan get married, providing them with a fix at their wedding reception in the last scene of the “heaven” chapter.
But after a while, even Casper can’t satiate the couple’s drug lust, and Candy gives up her painting to become a prostitute while Dan sits in their dilapidated warehouse apartment, waiting for the next fix. It’s at this point, in the “earth” chapter of the film, that their relationship begins to deteriorate. Candy begins to realize the “f—ing nightmare” Dan has led her into, and perfectly sums up their lifestyle in three sentences: “We’re junkies. I’m a hooker. He’s hopeless.”
This sense of hopelessness pervades the film as the audience watches Candy and Dan lose a baby, Candy go through a nervous breakdown and Casper die from a overdose (or suicide, anyone?) in the “hell” chapter. And even after all this, the film’s end is still heartbreaking and an abrupt end to a drawn-out addiction.
Candy does work well in many respects, especially because both Ledger and Cornish play surprisingly believable junkies – their erratic behavior and unflinching yearning for heroin are terrifying.
The duo make the film’s best scenes the most tragic ones, like when Dan and a pregnant Candy go through withdrawal: As Dan sits in the shower, beating his face and chest in frustration, Candy lies on their bed, cradling her pregnant stomach and downing pills and cheap bottle wine to get high. And as the two hold each other in a hospital bed, cradling their baby between them, pale and strung out from four days without heroin, you realize these two aren’t just mourning the loss of a child. They’re also mourning the one excuse they had to stop being junkies – perhaps the most tragic lost opportunity of all.
But Candy’s flaws are at its core, drastically hurting the audience’s ability to care for the film’s characters. We are introduced to Candy as a painter and Dan as a poet, but we don’t know how the two fell in love, why Dan started using heroin or why Candy decided to use as well. We know Candy doesn’t get along with her uptight, middle-class suburban parents, but we are presented with no backstory as to why.
The lack of character development is obvious and definitely a downside to the film – with more background, Candy could have been as great as Requiem for a Dream, a similar tale of the downward spiral created by drug use. But without the development, Candy just can’t compare.
Nevertheless, the film is still worth a viewing, if only for the unhealthy love story Ledger and Cornish portray so well. As their affair turns into a love triangle between hero, heroine and heroin, it implodes, and you realize there is a morbid poetry to Candy, a feeling of personal decay from the decadence of the couple’s destruction.
As Dan says, “The world is very bewildering to a junkie” – and just as bewildering to anyone who watches this film. But it’s a necessary type of surprise, the kind that makes you sit up straight, take notice of the world around you, and never do heroin. Never.
Contact reporter Roxana Hadadi at roxanadbk@gmail.com.
